creativity and confusion

This post consists of photos of my work and life during the last few confusing weeks.

Creativity has returned for me and I am grateful for time spent with new work.

I have several new starts, and if they were all pinned up side by side, I think we would see that I am following a new direction.  I don't quite understand it yet, but you know,  that's OK.
I just want to get this work out of me.
Although it makes me calm to do it, I am also in a kind of panic.

Our two youngest daughters are with us.
April has been here since the beginning of April and Grace arrived on June 4.

 I've been going into my town studio since June 1 - every week day.

 

When I'm there I use the large work table to support a piece I'm working on that is based on three old blankets.  It's immense, and each day's stitching is only a tiny mote.

Sometimes I listen to the podcast Sandy and Nora talk politics while stitching. 

 Just as often, I enjoy quiet.

I won't lie.
This pandemic time and this white fragility time  are very confusing and very heavy.

"There is no such thing as good painting about nothing." Mark Rothko

Take care of each other my friends.

To move slowly alongside

The solitude and quiet emptiness that I find on Manitoulin continues to be very important to my development as an artist.  I intentionally withdraw from people and put a lot of time into my work.  I touch my work a lot as I stitch it.

My pieces are large and simple, which makes it easy for my viewer to enter them.  They are safe, calm places.   I consider them a gift and am generous with the labour I put into my work.

I am planning an installation that uses old wool blankets to make a monumental walk-through corridor.  The rock cuts along the new highway 400 are the inspiration for this new work.  In northern Ontario, large areas of the Canadian Shield have been sliced open by blasting and heavy equipment to reveal eons of time and layers of beautiful sediment and crystals and minerals.

From the speeding car, we are able to look with awe at these magnificent grand pieces of Canada.  Trees grow on top of some of them.  There is something spiritual within these rock cuts.  The car keeps on moving.

My installation of blankets will encourage people to walk slowly alongside at an intimate closeness to the work.   I hope that people will experience the scale and weight of the familiar wool fabric, with their bodies.  Yearning to touch but not touching, and somehow feeling some deep truth of lived emotions that are part of our human experience.

The installation will have two parts, each part made from two or three blankets sewn together and bordered top and bottom with still more blanket cloth.  One part is shown in this post, and it measures 14 feet wide and 10 feet high.  The nick name for this part is Ash and Rose.

Blankets are already full of human time before I work with them.  Generations of time.  The marks of those hands and bodies have left signs of wear and all I have done is add more time and touch with hand stitch.  Both sides.

Materials such as blankets that relate to our universal human experiences in bed where things like birth, death, power or lack of power, pain, comfort, protection, and sex happen, are powerful metaphors.  Making crafted objects from them is contemporary art.

I work with hand stitch and used domestic cloth.
I make hand made things that invite the use of all our senses, especially the sense of touch. 

all at once

new work

Layers.  Horizontals.
Plant-dyed,light-weight cottons and silks.

Small pieces of cloth, each ironed in half and the fold stitched.
Then joined together into rows.

 All by hand.

Yesterday, I worked in my Little Current studio
(10 foot walls and good light)

I'm basting the pieced strips to a lightweight foundation.

I am trying to express what it feels like to look at the sky

Looking up.

the cosmos ...... the earth......  the atmosphere

At home, I am sorting.

Spring is here.

a big deal

I've been using the step ladder in my new studio
with those 10 foot walls.

Huge pieces.

It's all a big deal for me.

my pinwalls are made by covering the plaster with thin plywood and then
stapling 12 inch ceiling tiles, to that.   #husband did it

 I'm designing new work.

 Immense two sided pieces from rescued blankets and table cloths.

Soemtimes I'm dizzy ascending that ladder.

For a while, it felt as if I'd fallen in love.

wounded

contemplation and vulnerability
interior and exterior
dark and light

every single piece
damaged in some way
torn ripped collapsed

to be whole one must be wounded

the realtionship between my body and the scale of my work
the physical gestures of my arms and hands
the way the viewer needs to move back and forth to experience it

the network of large scars
the small repetitive piercings of the needle

I begin with cloth
ripping
pinning, touching, holding
stepping back from
looking at
feeling, remembering

the body is a way of knowing
and cloth is like the body

Phenomenology is the lived experience of the world for both maker and viewer.

the raw edges, the stitches,
literally catch the corner of our eye
this is a level of abstraction that you need to slow down for

the marks are made one at a time over a long period of time

I'm building on work I started years ago

small,nearly identical marks

slow down to see it
yearn to touch it

fragile cloth
monumental scale
phsyical repetitive activity

It is our senses and deep memories that connect us to our emotions,

(a post about my new work for exhibition)